Samsung has taken a dramatic step today towards world domination and the death of SMS by announcing an intriguing mobile cross-platform instant messaging service called ChatON. Similar to RIM's BlackBerry Messenger and Apple's iMessage, ChatON will be Samsung's foray into the global mobile communications service connecting all major smartphones and feature phone platforms. There will even be a web client to facilitate conversations between mobile devices and PCs. Furthermore, according to the press release, ChatON will allow users to share text, images, hand-written notes and videos.

Samsung's NYC event may have been rescheduled for August 30th, but that doesn't mean you'll have to wait till Tuesday to see the US versions of the Galaxy S II. We've already gotten a sneak peek at the visages of AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint's editions of the phone, and now (once again courtesy of Pocketnow) another press shot has been leaked:

This is, of course, the Epic Touch 4G - Sprint's version of the device.

Whoosh - looks like we can take the report of upgrades to the already impressive Galaxy S II and the upcoming Tab 8.9 from the rumor bucket and place it carefully on top of the confirmed stack. In fact, the rumor was not only spot-on regarding everything Samsung just officially announced, it even had more information that Samsung didn't cover, which means some details will keep the rumor tag until we find out more.

We've practically been counting down the days until Samsung's Galaxy S II event, which was originally scheduled for Monday, August 29, but now it looks like we'll have to add at least one more day to the count. Thanks to Hurricane Irene, New York City has been declared in a state of emergency and over 250,000 people have been evacuated, thus forcing Sammy to postpone the event at least one day, to Tuesday, August 30th.

Yesterday we highlighted a deal with VZW's first LTE phone, the HTC ThunderBolt. If the TBolt isn't your cup of tea, then Amazon Wireless has come through with yet another amazing deal on an LTE phone: the Samsung Droid Charge.

The Charge is still the only Droid branded phone infused with 4G LTE, and now you can get it for basically nothing when you sign up for new service with Big Red.

Our 6th and largest ever giant giveaway is already underway, but where is the winner of the 5th one? You can blame me for that - I decided to take a little vacation and have only had time for peeking in here and there. Organizing and sorting through the entries is no small feat, and I finally found a couple of hours to do so on the quiet (for now - the hurricane is coming!

Update: On further reflection, we're going to tentatively call this image a "rumor" for now, as we have no way to confirm its authenticity, but we have no reason to think these images are fake, either.

Finally, visual proof that unicorns do exist! Someone, somewhere, has leaked a shot of the upcoming Galaxy S II US market handsets headed for three of America's big four carriers (ATT, T-Mo, Sprint). Without further ado, here they are:

Where the image is from, we're not sure (pocketnow provided no details), but it could very well be a slide from Samsung's upcoming press conference to announce the arrival of the first US-friendly Galaxy S II phones.

It looks like Sammy has some big news for us in the coming weeks -- we already know we're going to hear about the Galaxy Tab 7.7 and the Galaxy Note at the IFA conference beginning September 1st, but now we're hearing rumors that Sammy will also unveil LTE versions of the Galaxy S II and the Galaxy Tab 8.9, both rocking upgraded specs from their non-LTE counterparts.

The LTE Galaxy S II is said to have a larger, 4.5-inch display along with a 1.5GHz dual-core processor (no word on whether it's an Exynos, but we assume that it is) along with the first ever LTE/WCDMA/GSM multi-band radio.

Samsung has an event coming up on Monday where the US Galaxy S II will finally be announced. We've all been waiting for this beast of a phone to hit US shores for some time, but word just broke that one big name will be left out of the announcement: Verizon. That's right, folks, Big Red will not be getting the SGSII.

It's rumored that VZW will instead be getting the Samsung Stratosphere, a QWERTY-slider along the same lines as the Epic 4G, as well as the Nexus Prime.

Buried deep within Samsung's Unpacked app is evidence of a few upcoming devices set to be announced at the IFA conference in Berlin, which begins on September 1st. Among the outed devices are two new additions to the Galaxy line, the Galaxy Tab 7.7 and the Galaxy Note.

As you might expect, the Galaxy Tab 7.7 will most likely be a 7.7 inch tablet, judging by the naming guidelines set in place by the Tab 10.1 and Tab 8.9.